


Except Thou Bless Me

by lasersforeyes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Castiel and Mental Health Issues, Depression, Gen, Implied Slash, M/M, Pre-Slash, Spoilers for S9E06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 18:38:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasersforeyes/pseuds/lasersforeyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU and sort-of coda to Episode 9x06.   Castiel, Dean, and an angel of mercy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Except Thou Bless Me

**Author's Note:**

> **SPOILERS for Episode 9x06**
> 
> Deals with depression and mental health issues, suicidal ideation.

He's forgetting, is the problem.

It happens in the spaces between now so-necessary breaths; happens when he's counting the packages of pastries in the display shelves; in the numbing acts of brushing teeth, filling the coffee machine, using the restroom, filling his ever-hungry stomach.

He's arranging squares of greasy iced carrot cake on the deli rack, four deep, the oldest to the front. He can no longer remember the texture of non-linear time. There is a vague sense of purple, he thinks; a color he never used to have to give a name to. Purple, and a spiral. Maybe blue. He shuffles a cake package to the front of the row and stands up, and the thought – if that's what it could be called - is gone.

His body forgets flying, when he wakes up cold and cramped in his sleeping bag in the doorway of the public library. During the night, he has tried to press himself closer to the door post, a faux-Renaissance column with a step at the bottom. His head ends up propped on the step and the strain in his neck and back is what wakes him. Wincing as he tries to gently stretch the pain away, he realizes that he no longer knows how to move non-existent wings; can barely remember the weight of them, strong and sleek even against his vessel's back. There is a bruised feeling in his spine – bare and vulnerable. An aching absence and nothing to recall to him the feeling of space passing beneath him.

He's scrubbing a stain out of the knee of his jeans in the bathroom. He's light-headed today because he slept too late to stop by the donut shop for breakfast, and has been drinking coffee all morning instead. It's a peculiar, not entirely pleasant feeling – a buzzing in his skin like a weak echo of some greater energy. He recalls that he used to like coffee. Now it makes his stomach hurt. The soap-covered paper towel is dissolving into shreds as he rubs it against the denim, and he finds that it reminds him of a truth he used to know like his body now knows breathing: the component parts of everything, the fabric of each element and being. He stops scrubbing and stares at the towel, the filaments of paper pilled on the damp material of his jeans. Cants his head as though the slight change in angle could reveal the pattern beneath the whole. Instead, the illusion remains. The moment yields nothing but the harsh flat fluorescent light, baring everything – the cracks in the skin of his over-bleached fingertips, the dirt in the whorl of his knuckles, the greenish color of his pale face in the mirror – illuminating nothing. Something feels sick and sour in his belly. He throws out the rest of his coffee.

Nora asks him if he's feeling all right, the next morning when he finds himself lost in counting plastic cigarette lighters. Once, he knows, he would have named the number of them at a glance, because the number is fundamental. Once they are created, they exist in that number until they are destroyed. He would have been able to see it, to know it without thinking. He has re-counted the tray twice, finds himself stymied when there is one too many black lighters to make a neat row of each color.

“You been sleeping in the back room again, Steve?” She smiles. “I appreciate your dedication, really, but seriously...stock isn't <i>that</i> important. You need to start getting a good night's sleep.”

He looks up at her, caught, flipping the lighter between his fingers as he's watched Dean do with his Zippo. How inscrutable her face is to him. He understands the gesture of a smile, knows that there is something like amusement in the arch of her eyebrows and the tilt of her lips, but he can't see anything else about her. He doesn't even know if she lives alone or with someone, if her parents are alive or dead. For a second, though, he thinks he sees a pulsing blackness, somewhere behind her. His head jerks in that direction and his aching muscles tense, but there is nothing there. 

“I...I'm fine.”

Her look has turned into something more serious, when he looks back at her and he realizes that this is probably a moment in which his face has betrayed him. He shouldn't have looked. He smiles back.

“Too much coffee, maybe.”

She laughs at that, and claps him on the shoulder as she passes behind him.

“You should watch that.”

He nods and stares back down at the lighter in his hand. Her touch has spurred a sudden and profound collapse inside of him, a hollow feeling worse than any hunger. He remembers, for an instant of brutal clarity, the touch of his hand to a body lying cold and still in a grave, and the ignition of his grace, searing the soul back into the flesh, knitting together every precious molecule with heavenly intent. The mark of that passing of energy, grace to soul to body, was once seared into the body's arm like a signature. 

Now he can't even organize a tray of lighters without wondering why nothing seems to fit.

~

He sees the blackness again two days later. It seems to swarm quietly in the door while he's opening up in the morning, fingers fumbling the key in their numbness. He thinks at first that it is one of the uncomfortable and ever more common side effects of poor sleep, but it doesn't dissipate immediately when he turns on the overhead lights. It gathers in the corner by the register, hunkering, faint and flickering, but undeniably there.

Something bristles inside him, under his shoulder blades and he lowers his head and paces forward. His angel blade feels warm inside his jacket, but no sooner has he let it slip into his hand than the blackness disappears. He blinks at the corner for a moment longer before warily stepping up to the coffee machine to start the morning brew.

 

It happens again the next day, and the next.

It comes at random times and in random places, but seems to be following him. With a cool, heavy dread, he wonders if it is a demon, circling him, waiting for the right moment to possess him. With no paycheck yet, he can't afford to get an anti-possession tattoo, so he inks one on in Sharpie during his lunch break. His fingers are trembling, and for a moment he forgets the fourth sigil. Stares at his drawn face in the foggy mirror, his mind a blank, yawning emptily around the lonely and tiny thought that never quite materializes in words.

With the sigil finished, though, the particular fear fades a bit. He continues to make his hollow motions, minute by minute, hour by hour. He mops the floor in the same pattern each time, until the squares of the dingy tile become the whole world, and the motions of cleaning become a ritual to make it right. He supposes that what he feels when the job is finished, yet again, could be called satisfaction, but the blackness still lurks, as though he were slowly going blind.

The third day, he says an exorcism, and his tongue trips over _transfigurátus in ángelum lúcis_ , his mind slipping sideways for an instant, into a void where nothing exists. He finishes the exorcism with a guttural whisper, defeated and confused.

~

He doesn't mention the blackness to Nora, of course, but when he hears Dean's rough growl on the other end of the phone line, something terrible and painful rolls over inside him for just a moment, and he catches himself on the verge of telling Dean that there is a demon haunting him. He and Dean could hunt it together. Destroy it. Castiel feels a fire in his chest, like gasoline lit by a match – an anger, a despair, so enormous that he could almost imagine that something of his grace remains, awakened by this taint of evil, ready to smite it with all the heavenly righteousness he can muster. It lasts only half a second, before the weariness of his body quenches it and he finds himself staring at the explosion of blue Slushee all over the floor. He hangs up the phone.

The blackness gets stronger.

Castiel re-inks the anti-possession sigil each day. He watches warily each new customer, worries over Nora, but the blackness never truly touches any of them. 

It mocks the brightness of Dean's smile when he arrives. It follows him into the store, while Castiel is punching in Keno numbers for the tiny, wrinkled woman who comes in every day, broken English and her three tickets in hand, hoping. She won two dollars last week, and nodded curtly, as though satisfied. When Castiel looks up at the next customer, the blackness comes rushing in to tease him, just outside of his painfully narrow peripheral vision. It doesn't seem interested in Dean, however. It is waiting for him.

And when he sees the disintegration of the girl beside the school bus, he understands why.

 

His stomach clenches like a fist and he wonders for a moment if he will get sick, but it doesn't feel exactly like that. His skin is pricked by a million pins, his heart beats too fast and too hard. It's as though a dam has given way and all of those banished tons of water are rushing back in. His legs weak, he leans against the Impala, palms sweating on the cool, smooth hood. His reflection in the car's black coat is a dark hole, a faceless shape with the watery late-fall light behind it. Dean's presence beside him is searing, and he feels the baffling and overwhelming instinct to press against it, to grasp Dean's grimy field jacket in his fists and let the terrible flood take him.

 

An angel of mercy.

Names knife through his skull.   _Tariel. Remiel. Ruchiel. Isda._  The blinding flash, the deep swirl of darkness after. The ringing of a thousand new stars. Dissolution. Peace.

“When an angel is too badly wounded to be healed...”

“He is continuing his Heavenly mission down here...”

The moment passes. Castiel takes a deep breath as he folds himself into the comforting leather of the Impala's passenger seat. He's not completely sure why he doesn't go with Dean on the hunt. Dean said it was because he was scared; maybe he is. He has certainly known fear before, during his millions of years as a Heavenly warrior, but this feels different. It's as though every feeling has become cosmically vast, and he has become so small. 

He almost wishes there were terror there, just to cover over the abyss of all that he's forgotten.

The ride to Nora's house is all but entirely silent.

He remembers how he used to hear the timbre of the universe in the hum of the Impala's wheels. He wonders if he and Nora will have sex. He doesn't know what she wants of him, what she sees when she looks at him. His true form would have burned her from the inside out. Now people like her look at him so softly, as though he were fragile. Or perhaps, he thinks, they need something of him. He tries to find the warmth of that thought in the icy tide swirling between his ribs.

He leans back in the door when Dean drops him off at Nora's house. Dean's looking at him fondly, a half-smile on his face. Once, Castiel would have been able to see the fluctuating aura of his soul, locate the threads of pain and self-loathing within the bright corona, like sun-spots. Now, he can only watch Dean's face and sincerely hope that his friend is at momentary peace. Does he seem happy? Content, at least? With all the angels banished from Heaven, and the King of Hell deposed, does Dean feel that he and Sam can finally win? Perhaps it is his relative freedom from Castiel's presence and influence that brings him such confidence and calm. The burning, too-much-coffee feeling lances quickly through Castiel's stomach, and he turns away toward Nora's door. He doesn't think the angel of mercy will hurt Dean. 

After all, the black presence follows Castiel all the way to the door.

~

He is pacing the small, brightly painted room. A baby is crying in the cradle. The sound unnerves him, but he finishes his perimeter. Nora told him the baby shouldn't be hungry, but he contemplates a bottle anyway. He hasn't eaten anything himself, even though Nora kindly told him that he could.

He has misunderstood, yet again, and the failure settles dully under his skin, like another layer of dirt slowly burying him. 

Not long ago, he would have been able to soothe the child's crying with a touch. He would have been able to heal Sam, or look into his soul to see the source of his malady. He would have been an asset to the brothers, a protector. Not a burden.

Blackness fills the corners, and he finds himself worrying that it will reach the cradle. 

He picks up the child, who twists angrily in his arms. She wants her mother, not him. He tries to sing to her – and once would have been able to lull her with the hushing susurrus of the cosmos, but now he can barely remember the words to some foolish song that plays on the five-hour music loop at the gas station. The child looks almost affronted at his attempt, but it quiets her in the end. Her heartbeat is tiny and fast under his hands, and he presses it to his own, remembering faintly that humans find solace in the pulse of another. 

He, too, used to find the rhythm of creation to be soothing. The signals of the stars echoed in the core of his grace, much like a human heartbeat, and when he was young, millions of years ago, he remembers being comforted by it. Finding joy in it. He knows that there must have been joy. But he can't recall what it felt like. His ears are deaf to that celestial rhythm – the world is as good as silent. His lonely heartbeat churns and churns in his vessel's blood and hears no echo, no response.

The baby is calm in his arms, finally, and he is startled to feel a warm wetness on his cheeks.

He is standing in a nursery room in a strange home in the strange town of Rexburg, Idaho, on the western half of the continent of North America in the northern hemisphere of the planet. There are billions of other humans all around him, and angels, too, wandering lost across the world, and he cannot hear any of their voices. He cannot feel any of their heartbeats. All he can feel is the pulse of one child where she is pressed against his arm; all he can hear is the gurgle of her breath, and the uneven gasp of his own as all of the world's emptiness presses down on him like a fist determined to crush him into the ground.

The blackness, as though sensing its moment, rushes against him like a tide, filling his nose and mouth.

It is then that the angel of mercy comes.

~

He is looking up into golden eyes that hold the promise of peace.

He is looking up from where he kneels on the grass of the front lawn.

The child is back in the cradle, inside. He placed his body, in some bizarre latent instinctual way, between the angel and her.

“I am here for you, Castiel.”

He nods, dumbly.

This is not a battlefield. This is not the last redoubt. 

Here, they are both lost. But this – the tableau recorded on a thousand tapestries, sung in a thousand stories – makes sense, is universal.

The wounded warrior, his life-force nearly gone, on the ground, his face tilted upward for the final benediction.

The angel, dark wings spreading to blot out the stars, with gentle hand upraised.

Castiel parts his lips, but he will not close his eyes.

He wants to see the grace of an angel as oblivion comes. It is the last gift that Heaven will ever give him.

Ephraim stretches his fingers towards Castiel's forehead.

It is then that Dean comes.

 

Ephraim has retained his soldierly quickness, and the angel blade that flashes in Dean's hand goes flying across the room, as does Dean himself, with a casual backhand.

Something older and stronger than the wish for death flares to life within Castiel and he is on his feet, face to face with Ephraim, blocking his fallen friend from the angel's line of sight, blade in his hand. 

Ephraim grabs Castiel's arm in iron fingers to disarm him, and pushes him back to his knees, painfully twisting his wrist until something snaps. Ephraim's borrowed face morphs into a growl, and Castiel knows that he feels pain, then, for the angel's grace cries with it, making Castiel wince more than the pain in his own arm. The angel vibrates the very air around them and Castiel feels as though his chest is being crushed from the inside. 

“Get rid of him, Castiel, and let me do what needs to be done!”

“Don't hurt him.” Castiel pleads, softly. 

“Cas, what are you doing?” Dean's voice is thick from where he has probably split his lip in the fall. He sounds dazed, and Castiel knows the exact expression that is on his face, without looking. The eyes wide, lit like candles. The lips parted, pulled from their usual firmness into a soft, pained “o”. 

Castiel closes his mind to it, letting the rushing blackness fill his senses. 

The grass is cool and wet against his knees. He feels a moment of dismay at the possibility of grass stains on the jeans he has just laboriously cleaned, wonders how he'll get them washed again in time for work in the morning, before realizing that he will never have to worry about it again. Such a petty thing, but it fills him with relief. He'll no longer have to worry about keeping his toothbrush sanitized, about finding a place to unroll his sleeping bag where the police won't wake him and make him move before morning, about collecting enough coins to buy day-old donuts for breakfast, about how to hide his belongings so they won't get stolen while he's at work, about keeping his phone charged and not forgetting it in the library or in the back room at the gas station, about the deep and abiding loneliness of being trapped in a dying human body, about the safety of his friends, fighting a war he started but could not finish, about how to fulfill the increasingly desperate need his body feels to be touched, taken care of. About the anguish of dreams where he raises a righteous man from Hell and falls for him in every way an angel can fall.

About the way his abbreviated name sounds, torn from that man's throat on a wave of utter despair and sorrow, as he staggers towards him with a bloody face and eyes searching, pleading. 

“Cas! Cas, don't _do_  this! We can fix it, Cas, you don't have to do this, _please_ , please, Cas, just talk to me, man!”

Unwittingly, the word slips from Castiel's lips like a final prayer.

“Dean...”

His tears are so startlingly warm. The rest of him feels like ice. He looks longingly up at Ephraim, whose eyes reflect a loss he understands like the breath nestled in his human lungs.

“It's time, Castiel. Let me ease your suffering. Let me at least do this. Please.”

“Cas!”

The baby cries inside. The cold dew of the grass soaks into the joints of his knees. The stars wheel overhead. 

Castiel wraps his arms tightly around the hollow in his belly and cries out, the first sound that he has managed to give to his own pain, since falling. 

His body seems to be out of control – it shakes and refuses to either stand or keep kneeling, and instead tries to crumble sideways somehow, where it fetches up against something solid and warm and wildly beating.

“Cas, buddy...c'mon...c'mon...”

Dean's voice is so close it might be inside his head, rough and rasping against the sting of his pain, the ache of lacerated memory. Arms tighten around him, pressing his biceps against his own ribcage, so tightly that he can feel Dean's pulse against his own, neighbor to his quailing heart. His chest roughly heaves, pushing out short, hoarse breaths into the damp, hot skin over Dean's collarbone.

“Dean, I'm sorry...” he tries to say, but a gust of air over his ear hushes him, and he realizes that Dean's hand is awkwardly stroking from the nape of his neck to his shoulder blade. It burns like holy fire.

“Hey, it's okay...it's okay. I got you. You're okay. We're gonna fix it, Cas. Don't you worry, buddy. You're with me.”

Dean's voice is unsteady, wavers like he has something caught in his throat. His presence surrounds and smothers Castiel, hot and close and branding him like iron. His arms around Castiel's body are like a cage, ever tightening. Through the drowning roar of his own blood in his ears, the empty howl of a feeling too big to name, growing to eternity around them, the sound of Dean's heartbeat thunders like a battle drum, striking him again and again until he is bowed and bloody, and nothing is left.

Above them, the angel of mercy ruffles his wings in consternation. Castiel can almost feel the confusion and upset radiating from him – deprived of his mission, he shifts uncertainly. Castiel slowly turns his head and regards Ephraim from the circle of Dean's arms.

“You cannot...” he begins, but stumbles over the confusing choices of words in English to convey what he wants to say. 

In the end, he chooses Enochian, because it feels warm and comforting in his lungs and in his mouth, and because it has so few words.

_You cannot take away all pain. You cannot go back. You can only go on._

Ephraim's brow furrows, and he is suddenly young, though he is nearly as old as Castiel. He pulls his wings in tight.

_But it is my duty!_  

_We will fight. To bring Heaven back. And in that day, if we fail, I will go to you. But not now._

Dean makes a confused sound and Castiel realizes that he wants to know what they are saying to each other. He shifts slightly in the trap of his friend's arms and sits up, feeling hollowed out and weary. With his hand still clutching helplessly to Dean's jacket, he switches to English, looking up at the angel of mercy.  The words come out dry as dust, empty as air, but he hopes that they will suffice.

“Now, we have work to do.”

~

The Impala is silent. The night is silent. There is silence, too, inside Castiel, where everything but the monotonous rhythms of his body has been wrung out. Dean sits facing him and wraps up his wrist in a bandage and splint, not speaking. Dean has run out of words, too.

By some mutual agreement, they sit in the car all night, watching the cold stars through the windshield. Castiel can feel the urgency in Dean's body beside him, wanting to break the quiet, wanting to ask him that most human of questions. But Castiel is too weary, and his head keeps falling against the passenger side window, his eyes refusing to stay open.

He doesn't dream. All of his dreams have dried up and floated away. Only the terrifying truth remains: that he will go on, that he will keep breathing, walking, speaking. He will exist until everything he is or was becomes as lost to him as the knowledge of flying, until he can barely remember his own name, and the only thing he knows with any certainty is the way a righteous man's green eyes fill with stars when he is begging him to stay.

~~~


End file.
